Quick Hits

I don't often post to Twitter.  I could, as I have an account over there, but I've not been very good at doing that.  It just seems for me to be too time consuming.  However, if I were to be more active on a platform like that then these are some of the things I might have recently posted.

People wonder about the sluggish growth in Illinois and particularly in the Chicago area.  Here might be some of the reasons for that.  According to the City Combined Taxpayer Burden Report for 2021 a taxpayer resident of Chicago would owe on the combined pension burdens of the various entities of $74,000.  Add in the additional $52,000 that taxpayer owes on Illinois' pension obligations and you get a whopping $126,000 burden per taxpayer.  Hard to get excited about wanting to come here and assume that.

We seem to be in the inverse of last year's economy.  Back then we were shutting down businesses at a rapid pace over a very short period of time.  Now we're trying to reopen these same things at a rapid pace over a very short period of time.  Not surprised then as demand exceeds supply that in the short-term we're seeing inflation.  Let's see where we are with this in the next six months or so.

I've talked to at least six business people begging for workers in the past week or so.  Several have told me that when they call people who used to work for them, they're told point blank that they're not coming back until the government's money goes away.  Seems if you can make the same or about the same with a "stimmie" check by doing nothing versus actual labor then the default option for most worker is to do nothing.

Everybody is looking for this mass correction in the markets.  That could happen and we discussed it two three posts before this on May 4, 2021.  However it's also possible that stocks correct mostly by time.  That is they just churn around in a trading range for some period of time doing nothing.  That's boring for financial market commentators, but is not so bad for investors.  I mean if you look back to where we were a year ago at this time and see where we are today,  I think most investors would take a trading range where we worked off any valuation issues and let the earnings catch up with the markets and the economy.

The pain trade, the thing that hurts traders the most in the short-term, would be for a melt-up in stocks.  We've seen the fast money crowd raise a lot of cash in the past few months in expectation of said correction.  A correction may happen and perhaps the fast money will be correct but a rapid rise in prices here would likely hurt them the most.

Back next week.

Now again I'm asking for a favor. I'm trying to do an overall review of my communications strategy to clients and friends of the firm going forward.  If you are a client of mine please let me know via dropping me an email, text or call if you've been reading this blog in the past few months.  I'd appreciate finding that out.

Thanks